April 23, 2017
Metonymic diapasons of symphonic linguistic dimensions
After so many years, there is an amusing hope that amidst the chaos and everydayness, there has been a practice, perhaps a martial art grounded in everyday acts. Wax on. Wax off. Painting. Mopping. Sweeping. It's tempting to trivialize in a pop-cultural irrelevance. What is important is an intentional practice. A set of rituals performed only for one's self, with no apparent reward or public acknowledgment, acts carried out in private as it were. The practice is it's own reward, hearkening back to the play behavior of children. To be rewarded or even praised for play ruins it, short circuits the autistic feedback loop via the gaze of the other. Once you know an other is watching you practice, you become self-conscious, and lose the natural grace and flow of what you always do when no one else is around.
So memory. Intentional memorization. I learned early on, no one - very few - wants to hear a poem recited to them, especially one of Shakespeare's sonnets. On the few occasions where someone called upon me to recite, I was immediately self-conscious and often fumbled the recitation. A poem I had perfectly recited to myself a thousand times now clumsy in my mouth.
Initially, these failures concerned me as being symptomatic of a neurological decline. But I quickly realized as soon as I was alone, the poem was there intact and beautiful, flowing from my heart to my mouth with perfect ease, as natural as breathing.
For years now, I have engaged in this practice of memorization. Memorization towards no end... at least, such has always been my assumption. However, it has been changing me, shaping my mind, my thoughts, my language in subtle ways. The heartbeat of iambs float more often through my prose these days than they once did before. Analogies of heart and eye, of shadow and dream, of death and time are more magnetic in my mind. Particular words such as "slouching," "buckle," "pluck," "ghastly," "dominion" (and so many more) now ring with deeper resonance, metonymic diapasons of symphonic linguistic dimensions. Rising cumulonimbus thunderheads in my mind.
As I return to the practice of writing after so many years away, I am aware of this unconscious training. All the years spent reciting, working to memorize poetry and prose, have disciplined muscle and nerve, attuned the ear, allowing me to narrow the chasm that once existed for me between my thought and expression. What will come of this, I know not. However, the feeling of my mental muscles grasping and wrestling with the language is one of the healthiest feelings I've had in a long while.
On Being A Lookout for Fires
From William James' "moral equivalent of war" to Hemingway's injunction to live one's life "all the way up," the vital concern is how to remain awake. And not lie to yourself about what "degree of awakening" you've achieved. It's either / or. You either are or you're not. Whether that be awake in a worldly or spiritual pursuit isn't of concern. I'm sitting here in a chair punching myself in the face like a Charles Bukowski parable, asking: Are you awake? Are you awake now, Motherfucker. Keep punching.
There's a nice resonance about an internal Watchman on the Tower, alert for fire or warning others to stay away from your shores. But anytime I have ever dreamed of becoming a Kerouacian anti-hero on a fire lookout or Stephen Dedalus in a remote lighthouse (and there's that concerned group that are on the lookout for "the perfect job for you"), but then appears the spectre of the over-zealous managerial mustached supervisor lording over me his one dickless iota of power, raging at me in a passive-aggressive mewing tone of aggreivement over infractions of Kafka-esque rules and policy. How it always ends. It's never All Day Permanent Red. It always shades of a pink and a mauve tired world. Don Quixote is confined to the Dementia Ward of the Nursing Home. Hamlet is given Electroshock Therapy. Ahab is denied a ship and spends his days maniacally hammering white mackerel to pulp on the beach and his nights howling at the bottom of the bottle. Better to become a ship's captain to one day drive full bore into the rocks below the Lighthouse. Or to walk through the Redwoods with a flame-thrower.
The Dream of the Maldive Shark
Before I went to sleep the other night, I was working on memorizing Melville's Maldive Shark. Somewhere in the night, I started "dream memorizing" it - which happens every now and then. In a sort of half-awake, not wanting to fully awaken state, I will recite a poem to lull myself back to sleep. As the words echoed, I wondered, once again, if Melville intended the shark to be an ambivalent analogy for what goes in the great blank for the word "God", in the same slippery-fish manner as M. Dick. In the dream, it was suddenly and undeniably obvious the human role with regard to the "pale ravener" was that of the pilot fish, all of humanity shared in this, we were all servant ministers to this lethargic and dull dotard deity, obediently leading it to it's prey, taking shelter in the port of serrated teeth, the charnel of maw. I awoke like Archimedes and quickly scanned the written poem for verification, but the "undeniably obvious" radiant solution to the mystery of the poem had vanished.
What in the dream seemed the Key to a Great Mystery, the discovery of a great treasure hidden behind the wall of one of Melville's poems, as if the occult face of a being beyond our world was looking up from the inside of the poem as I was looking down from the outside, now, in the light of day, was merely a curious literary insight. These mysteries in dream that defy remembering frustrate and fascinate me. In the dream, I am wielding a burning sword of fire that can cut through the fabric of reality itself; when I awaken, I am only holding the pencil I fell asleep with the night before.
For in the dream of the Maldive Shark, I knew where to lead the Pale Ravener. I knew what it fed upon, what satisfied its insatiable appetite. I knew what it was and where to find it.